This past Saturday, the 15th I went to the Boston Book Festival, and it was so much fun.  It was also the first book festival that I ever attended and it definitely will not be the last.  I’m already looking forward to the 2017 festival.  I went to two keynotes, the first was the YA Keynote with Kami Garcia and was hosted by Sam from Thoughts on Tomes, it was very nice to meet one of my favorite BookTubers.  Kami Garcia had a lot of really good advice about life and writing, in general, one of the things that have really stuck with me is how she said something along the lines of  it doesn’t matter what you write, you are still a writer.  As a blogger, I never really considered myself a writer and hearing her say that, made me realize, that I am in fact a writer. She was also signing her newest book The Lovely Reckless, seeing as how I am on a book buying ban, I did not purchase the book to get it signed.

The other keynote that I went to was Turning Classics Inside Out which was hosted by Henriette Lazaridis and featured the authors Alison Case author of Nelly Dean: A Return to Wuthering Heights, Kat Howard author of Roses and Rot, which is a retelling of Tam Lin, and Elizabeth Nunez author of Even In Paradise, a retelling of King Lear by William Shakespeare.  In one of my college classes I had read the original Wuthering Heights, and I didn’t realize this until Alison Case mentioned it, but, some of the characters have names that start with the same letter, which makes it easy to mix the characters up.  She had this very good piece of advice if you are writing a novel, don’t make the names of your characters start with the same letter.  Kat Howard asked the audience if we were familiar with Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the majority raised their hands, she had a very good reason for doing this.  If you have read Grimm’s, you know that fairy tales have an ugly side to them, but they are also about changing.  Elizabeth Nunez told the audience that the entire premise of King Lear is told in Act I Scene I.  This keynote was really interesting and had a more academic feel to it.  However, I definitely want to read the retellings, along with the originals.

While I didn’t buy any books, I didn’t leave empty handed.  I picked up some Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them swag, a free poster and a very well written poem written by Allison Adair.  I also ventured to the Boston Public Library to check out the Shakespeare Unauthorized exhibit which was unbelievable.  Below you will find some pictures from the Shakespeare exhibit.

Also, don’t forget to ask me questions by Saturday at 8pm EST.